A billion TV viewers focused on Times Square on New Year’s Eve will see one glittering ball — and a lot of scaffolding.

Organizers of the 24-hour long millennium bash are trying to have some of the 13 unsightly wood, steel and canvas sidewalk sheds removed from Times Square in time for Dec. 31, but admit there’s little they can do about many of the ongoing construction projects.

Officials insist the construction sites do not pose a safety risk because crowds will be tightly controlled by a record number of police, who will be keeping revelers behind barricades set up at least 20 feet from buildings.

Brendan Sexton, president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, which is organizing the celebration, is certain the charred sign is not a bad omen.

“The Times Square event this year is so thoroughly planned and prepared for that I expect it to go more smoothly than the usual New Year’s Eve,” he said.

Still, with workmen laboring feverishly to finish flashy new billboards for the once-in-a-millennium advertising opportunity, there will be little time to test it all out before the expected 1 billion people tune in to TV broadcasts and 2 million people visit Times Square during the daylong festivities.

At the Conde Nast Tower on Broadway and West 43rd Street, a six-story-high video wall run by the Nasdaq stock exchange was still not turned on last week. Nasdaq “Market Sight” director Jack Feder said electricians are still working on internal wiring.

“We will launch it on the 28th [of December],” he said. “I’m fairly certain.”

The Conde Nast corner is one of many littered with jagged construction debris and scaffolding, but Feder said plans are to have it all tidied up for the big night.

Last week at One Times Square, the building from which the glittering ball will drop and anoint the new millennium, a long-standing sidewalk shed of plywood and steel tubing was still in place. And a new neon Budweiser sign high above the shed — between the giant Panasonic TV and the super-jumbo steaming Cup Noodles — was not yet finished.

The front of the new World Wrestling Federation gift shop at Seventh Avenue and West 44th Street was covered with a huge sidewalk shed festooned with a black vinyl advertising banner.

A 53-story, 562-unit hotel tower at the corner of West 47th Street and Broadway and the 230,000-square-foot Reuters tower at West 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue are still steel and concrete skeletons with cement trucks and hard-hatted construction workers busily mixing, hammering and welding as pedestrians stream past.

All work is scheduled to pause early on Dec. 31, Sexton said. Sexton said the police always make it a priority to keep crowds off scaffolding and away from construction sites. There will be 7,000 cops in and around Times Square this year — twice as many as last year.

It is expected that up to 2 million people will visit at some point during the celebration, which is scheduled to end at 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 1.